General

Craziness in Paris on Friday, November 13th, 2015

~ Roger JG Albert

It’s difficult not to fall prey to the anger that tends to envelop us when we hear of the kinds of atrocities that an apparently well-coordinated number of gunmen and suicide bombers managed to pull off in Paris yesterday. Indeed, we should feel anger. Lots of people happily going about their lives on a Fall Friday evening in Paris had their lives shattered by bullets and shrapnel. So many people died. Their families will never recover from the trauma. 

There is no excusing the actions of the perpetrators of the violence that shocked Paris yesterday. Their actions were impossibly harsh and barbaric. 

Some people find easy and ready explanations for why the men involved in this massacre did what they did. These explanations generally are based on the conclusion that only madmen could do such a thing. That makes it possible to consider such  actions idiosyncratic and not rooted in the very fabric of what it means to be human. 

That’s not how I explain this kind of disturbing behaviour. These men were not mad. In fact they were willing to put their lives on the line to achieve their own personal sense of immortality but also to secure the immortality of their social and cultural values and institutions, call them Muslim or Arab or whatever, it matters little. Their main  goal was to help rid the planet of what they consider the evil of the West. The evil that is the biggest threat to their world. And it is, of course.

Anyone understanding the history of the Middle East, especially during the last few centuries of colonialism and economic imperialism, cannot but conclude that the region has been overrun by European powers for their own aggrandizement producing massive dislocation and displacement of the local people. 

Whenever people are trampled upon for the sake of capital accumulation and corporate power there is bound to be disaffection and anger. Push back is going to happen. Some people who don’t have the ‘moral brakes’ that most of us have will push back hard as they did in Paris yesterday. We should not be surprised by that, but reacting as we  have historically to such atrocities has not worked to bring the peace most of us crave. Is there anything to be done?

To be continued…

Follow up on yesterday’s post on the Ernest Becker Legacy Conference at SFU

~ Roger JG Albert

In my last post I mentioned some of the conference speakers, among them Sheldon Solomon and Jack Martin. I quite enjoyed both of their talks which together summarized Ernest Becker’s thought and his biography. To generalize beyond caution, I dare say that every one of us is an ever changing individual confluence of experiences, actions, achievements, ideas, values, etc., bounded by a sac of flesh and bone and  wrapped in a social weave of interdependencies. Solomon and Martin ‘gave’ us the confluence that was Ernest Becker in as much complexity as was possible in a short time.* Of course, the conference title implied that Ernest Becker’s legacy would be the focus of discussion. In Becker’s case the legacy in question refers to the range of ways and means his ideas have informed those of others who have followed him. It’s what he left behind for others to use and build upon. That’s a staggering amount of information, ideas and insights to put it mildly. 

Most people who have used Becker’s work have focussed on this or that aspect of it. There’s too much of substance in Becker’s work spread over too many disciplines, making it close to a unified theory of social and biological life on a grand scale, to use the whole thing as a starting point for further analysis. We can gnaw away at the details and go from there, but it’s most difficult to follow Becker on the grand scale of things. A person would have to share his confluence of influences at the very least. I mean, he described his last book as a synthesis of Marx and Freud. Well, who is competent to judge whether or not he actually did that? Someone who at least shares his reading list and sees the world in ways that he did. Was he referring just to Marx and Freud or were these two names rallying terms for a huge number of writers and authorities that he also used? His Freud also included Rank, Jung (to a lesser extent), Adler, Brown, Jones and many others. His Marx included Frankfurt School types, the more humanistic Marxists like Fromm. In fact, I don’t see a lot of classical Marxism in Becker’s work so he must not have meant Marx,  but Marx-ists.  Becker’s confluence is complex and massive and  hardly matches anyone else’s so I think that we literally cannot follow Becker in the entirety of his thought. In fact, a prerequisite for reasonable commentary on Becker’s overarching thought, I  think, is a familiarity with the bulk of his reading list. You’ll need a few years to get through it.  You’ll also need an openness to his interpretation. 

I’ve already written that people have settled on aspects of Becker’s work to elaborate. It’s probably safer and necessary to do that in any case as I have just argued. So, we come to David Loy, a very nice man if I’ve ever met one, a Buddhist scholar, an activist one by all accounts. Google his name. He’s written a few books. His talk was interesting, but not so much for me because I just don’t easily go to ‘religious’ places in my thinking. Of course I’m probably doing Loy an injustice and I wouldn’t want to do that. Still, I probably wouldn’t read any of his work but I would love to sit and watch a beautiful sunset with him.

Larry Green was another of the conference speakers and a big part of the organizing crew. I have so much respect for all of the organizers and the participants in this conference and Larry is right up there. He earned my respect for whatever that’s worth (I have no illusions about the insignificant space I take up on this planet, so what would he do with my respect? I do not mean this in any kind of self-deprecating way.). He is a long time psychotherapist (44 years) and teaches the odd course at City University Canada. The blurb in the conference document states “His contribution will focus on alternatives to “in-group” identification as a source of ontological security.” That’s a tall order. Becker’s discussion of the moiety in Escape From Evil would be enough to scare me away from suggesting an alternative to how things have been organized socially on this planet for thousands of years with people dividing themselves into competing groups all the better to prove how wonderful and worthy a winning group is in its barter with the gods for immortality. For me, the problem is that Green is focussed on individual accommodation to life on this planet and not on the overall ontological issues around  group formation and social conflict. But that’s not meant to be a criticism, just a problem for me…as a sociologist who taught Canadian history, French, Anthropology and Sociology at a freshman level. Notice, there’s no Psychology in there. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have the utmost respect for a number of psychologists, psychoanalysts and even psychiatrists (one even still living). I just don’t follow them around into theory very far. I’m too much of a social evolutionist and Marxist for that.

Speaking of Marxists, Brad Hornick was one of the speakers. He used his time to talk about his own life and what he thought was necessary for the creation of social change great enough to reverse the insane course we’re on destroying the planet as fast as we can. Becker, in the closing paragraphs of Escape From Evil mentioned that if we could come up with a new immortality project, say one that was aimed at climate change, that we could just change the course of history and maybe save ourselves in the process. I don’t think he was all that confident if would happen, but he threw that in as a possibility. Hornick argued that capitalism has to go in order for any positive advances can be made to this planet’s climate. Commodity fetishism is not going to allow us to easily let go of our obsession with possessing goods, so we have to get rid of commodity fetishism. Frankly, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for humanity, but Hornick isn’t giving up and I respect him for that. He’s a grad student at SFU in my old S&A department there. I wish him all the best. It’s a tough row he’s decided to hoe. I doubt if many people at the conference had any idea of what he was talking about but it may have challenged them a little and prodded them to think of how Becker’s work can be used to address some of the fundamental social issues of our time. 

The last speaker I  took in during the conference was Andrew Feldmár. I’ll save my comments on him for tomorrow. I’ll also discuss briefly a couple of other speakers not yet mentioned. Tomorrow it is.

 

  • Confluence means flowing together, as in rivers and such things. The idea of a person as a confluence, that is, the sum total of ideas, values, experiences, influences, etc., all come together in a sac of flesh and bone surrounded by, interweaving and interdependent with others in a social maelstrom came to me in the shower the other day. It’s what accounts for what we call our individuality. No two people share perfectly the same set of ideas, values, experiences, etc., but some of us  overlap in those areas and we form communities on the basis of those overlaps (sometimes voluntarily, sometimes by accident or necessity, sometimes by circumstance).
  • I could not have come up with this idea if I had not read widely in sociology and other related disciplines. It’s only on the basis of my reading list that I can even conceive of such strange things. Some of you may shudder a bit while reading this as you try to make sense of it from the point of view of your own confluence. The more you read the same kinds of ideas I did (and do) and share the same class background, etc., the more you may be able to parse my meaning. Very few people on the planet share my reading list or yours for that matter, that is if you have a reading list. Most people don’t. That in itself is neither here nor there. I can say though that having an extensive reading list in certain disciplines is definitely not a prerequisite for a happy life. In fact it can complicate life beyond salvage resulting in an inability to enjoy the simple things. But aren’t I getting serious now? Time to lighten up a bit. 
  • © Roger J.G. Albert 2015

Life is like that: staving off dementia

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 9 Comments

I haven’t posted on this site for some time because my life has taken me into other directions for a time now.  For instance, I’ve had physical injuries to consider and pain is my constant reminder of my humanity.  It also limits my mobility since some of the pain I’m experiencing is in my right knee.  The pain makes it difficult for me to walk any distance.  I also tore a rotator cuff and that’s a bummer.  Still waiting to see an orthopaedic surgeon on that one.  Yet, I’m happy to report, things are improving. The pain is becoming manageable and I’m taking fewer meds than I have been.  I’m trying to cut out some of my meds altogether but I’m no martyr so if the pain gets intense again, I’ll be right back there gobbling pills.  I’ve tried physiotherapy – different kinds – but the pain is not from muscular injury but rather from connective tissue damage so working on my muscles has limited effect, at least that’s what I think.  Besides, all that stuff is expensive and I don’t have a limitless pot of money to play with.  Still, things are moving along.

I’ve been able to help Carolyn in the yard putting railings on the stairs, etc., in preparation for the garden show we were featured in this past July 27th.  I love my woodworking shop and have been spending lots of time in there. The garden show was fun, but leading up to it was hard work and required lots of meds and rest times for me to carry on.  Maybe I’ll post pictures here soon of what we’ve been doing. Strangely, I’ve been indifferent towards painting and drawing recently although I’m now feeling the stirrings and I’ve picked up the coloured pencils again.  I have a painting that needs finishing. I’ve been thinking about it a lot and planning how to tackle the next set of challenges with it, but I have time coming up so I’ll get back to it soon.  Doing portraits for some people is easy but I have to work at it.  That’s part of the fun of it.  I’m also working up to doing some sculpture in wood.  I need to get my tools sharpened and that in itself is a challenge.  I need to get lessons on how to do that quickly and easily.

All this to say I haven’t been spending a lot of time posting on this blog.  I have been thinking about what I want to do with the blog, but I have lots of doubt whether or not any of this is worth anything.  It’s not as if I have nothing to say, it’s whether anyone is listening that is the issue and what difference it might make one way or another.  It may be that I use this blog to work out issues I’m thinking about with regard to politics, social action, evolution, economics and such things just for the challenge of getting my ideas straight. It might just help stave off dementia as I get older.  At least that’s what I want to believe.

My father is my 8th cousin.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 13 Comments

My father is my 8th cousin.

 

So, I’m not at all certain that it’s true that my father is also my 8th cousin, but it is entirely possible given my family history and the interrelationships between the Alberts, Michauds, Leguerriers and Gauchers over several generations. [1] There is clear evidence that the Michaud and Albert clans came over from the Poitou area of France together in the mid 17th century. On my mother’s side of the family, the Leguerrier side, it seems that Guillaume was the first to arrive in Canada. He arrived sometime just before 1748. My paternal grandparents Thomas Albert and Edna Michaud are 6th cousins so it seems the families that appear most predominantly in our family histories intermarried frequently enough.

 

Maybe as I get older I think more about my own death just because I’m getting closer to that time and time seems to be moving ever so fast. But I do glance away from my own belly button from time to time. I’m also fascinated with my family’s history, mostly as I try to imagine what my ancestors experienced as they lived out their lives. What would have possessed my ancestor Guillaume Leguerrier to leave his home in St. Léger, Normandy in the middle of the 18th Century?

 

I’m in the process of translating parts of Les Leguerrier au Canada by Victor Leguerrier in 1974. This is a massive study of the Leguerrier family in the New World. It needs to be updated, but it’s complete to the mid 1970s. What follows is a translation of pages 15 and 16 of that text:

Among the possible hypotheses on the origins of the Leguerriers, there is one that proposes that the Leguerrier were originally from Switzerland and that they ended up in the Channel Islands of Jersey and Guernsey fleeing from religious persecution. Some of the refugees ended up back on the continent, in Brittany. One Leguerrier, it is said, left the Channel Islands to settle in Wales, about one hundred and fifty kilometers to the southwest of London.

Certain contemporary [1974] Leguerriers in France report that oral tradition has it that the Leguerriers had lived in Brittany but that in the 15th Century some had come to live in Normandy. At that point they abandoned the Breton language to adopt French as their language. As to their name, they simply translated the Breton word for their family name into French, which ended up as “Leguerrier”.

The French origins of the Leguerriers in Canada are in St. Léger, Normandy, a tiny village situated at an altitude of 100 meters above sea level, at about 10 kilometers from Grandville and at about 18 kilometers to the north-east of Avranches in the Manche District. St. Léger is in the Coutances Diocese. The population is about 75 inhabitants [in 1974].

The ocean, about 7 kilometers away, is visible from St. Léger. Next to the church which is in the Norman architectural style there are a few stone houses, all occupied. Close by, in the south, at the base of a small hill flows the little Thar river that flows west towards the ocean where one can also find the partially restored ancient Lucerne Abbey.

The first and only Leguerrier to come to New France was Guillaume Leguerrier.

“Son of François Leguerrier and Anne Lebreton”, he was baptized on the 11th of January 1715 in the St. Léger Church by the Parish priest, Father M. Ainue. The godfather is listed as “Guillaume le Poupé and the godmother was Marguerite Lebreton, Ivan Lebreton’s daughter.” [I have no idea what the quotation marks mean here.]

Guillaume had brothers and sisters:

 

Louyie,           baptized on January 11th, 1702

Yvan,             baptized on May 7th, 1705

Andrée,          baptized on July 15th, 1708

Madeleine,    baptized on February 14th, 1720.

 

At that time there were other Leguerrier in St. Léger, as recorded in the parish registry:

  •  Nouelle Leguerrier was godmother at a baptism in 1704.
  • Catherine le Guerrier, wife of Claude Youffre, had her son Jean marry Jacqueline Pestour on September 30th, 1711.
  • Pierre Leguerrier, priest, attended the burial of a 7 or 8 year old child. A Claude Leguerrier assisted in this task. Pierre, the priest, signed the register   “leguerrier” and Claude, who has a nice handwriting, signed “le Guerrier.
  • Jacques le guerrier, sieur of the ‘her Pierre berbière’ (?) is present at a wedding on February 17th, 1718.
  • Julienne le toxa, wife of Jacques le guerrier, sieur of la her Pierre [whatever that means], is listed as godmother at the baptism as Julienne petoux, daughter of Jean petoux and Jeanne le terrier.
  • Françoise le guerrier, widow of Robert le petour, who had died the day before, was interred on November 22nd, 1719. She was about 70 years old.

There are currently Leguerrier in France who claim to be descendants of François, thus of Louyie or Ivan, Guillaume’s brothers. These Leguerrier claim that they are from St-Ursin, a tiny village close to St. Léger.

As Guillaume was making his way to North America, one of his brothers established himself in the neighbouring village. The descendants of this brother include Victor Leguerrier, grandfather to several Leguerrier currently living in France.

We note that there is another Victor Leguerrier living in Rennes, France. Finally there is a woman living in Switzerland who claims that her ancestors are from St. Léger.

[1] My sister, Claudette, has done a lot of snooping around the family tree and has published a number of calendars and booklets of family memories. distant cousins on my mother’s side, Victor Leguerrier, published a history of the Leguerrier family in Canada (1974), a very serious study of over 600 pages, and Marcel Lirette published Descendants of Antoine Micheau and Marie Train (date unknown- I remember getting my copy around 2005).

 

Just a little depressing viewpoint for you about crime, poverty and ill-health.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

 

Be thankful that there’s crime in the Comox Valley. Without crime there would be a huge hit to the Valley economy. Just think about it. No need for police. Save a few million there. No need for criminal lawyers, counselors, support staff. Save a few more there. No need for probation or parole offices, John Howard Society. None of that. There would be no domestic assault, so no need for The Transition Society or other support services for women fleeing domestic abuse. So, next time you see someone doing something criminal, thank them for their contribution to the economy. If they go to jail, they even do a better job of contributing to the economy. Inmates have to be fed, watched all the time and ‘administered.’ There’s lot of money for business in servicing prisons.  Never mind that there’s a lot of money in building prisons, tons of concrete and such things. Stephen Harper would love more jails.  He must have friends in the concrete business.

 

Poor people as so important to the economy too. Wow. If there was no poverty, there would be no need for social services, affordable housing, the Food Bank, most of what The Salvation Army does, nor for soup kitchens and charities of all kinds.

And holy jeez. If we were all healthy and never sick, wow, think of the savings there. No hospitals, no doctors, no physiotherapists, no pharmacists, no labs, none of those.

The Comox Valley depends on crime, poverty and sickness to have a healthy economy. To figure that out, all you have to do is look at the stats or read the Comox Valley Social Planning Society’s Quality of Life Report. It’s available online at:

http://cvsocialplanning.ca

So, next time you run into a criminal, a poor person or someone who is physically or mentally ill, give them a big hug, a warm handshake and a huge THANK YOU. So many jobs in the Valley depend on them, both direct and indirect. Maybe the Economic Development Society should promote crime, poverty and sickness. It just might do more for economic development in the Valley than what they’re doing now.

And you know what? I haven’t even mentioned fear yet. My, my. If we could eliminate fear we could get rid of so many services we’d hardly need anyone to do anything anymore. So, get out there and scare the shit out of somebody. For the sake of the economy!

Mutiny of the Soul – Reality Sandwich

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 4 Comments

Mutiny of the Soul – Reality Sandwich.

I find this quite refreshing.  A perspective that argues that the world drives people crazy and sick.  This isn’t the first compelling argument I’ve come across on this subject (see René Spitz, Thomas Szasz, R.D. Laing, Otto Rank, Ernest Becker, etc.) but most people are so totally ignorant in this regard that any article that comes out that even hints at a socially-based explanation for depression, fatigue, mental illness, and I pay attention.  It’s good to share too, isn’t it?  My mom always said it was.

There is a reference to this article on Facebook.  I thought I’d share.

Life is complicated.

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

I  don’t mean this series of posts to be or become an exposé of my family’s little secrets. I have not discussed this series with my family members at all.  I’m sure they would have very different memories and impressions of the lives we shared than I do.  I use some of the incidents and events I know about or have some impression of as a means of expressing my sense of the complexity of life and especially of relationships both personal and social.

______________________________________________________________________

Life is complicated. Relationships are complicated. People are complicated. Take my father, for instance. He was intelligent, generous, level headed and kind hearted, but at times he had fits of anger that were shocking because they were so out of character for him. He teased us mercilessly, sometimes to distress. He could be, and was, physically violent on rare occasions. We never spoke of such things so I have no way of knowing what were the deep-seated causes of his rare bouts of uncontrollable anger. He was never violent towards my mother that I know of, but he beat my older sisters one time that I recall very vividly. From what I remember, my sisters were whining and complaining about doing the dishes or some such thing, probably yelling and screaming, fighting amongst themselves when my father, for some reason had had enough of it. He let fly with a pot that was handy, hitting them with it repeatedly until they were all cowered on the floor, weeping and in shock. I might have been six or seven years old at the time and I remember cowering myself in the hallway, by the bathroom door wondering what could possibly be going on. To this day as I think about it, I can still feel the sense of fear that overwhelmed me at the time. I don’t recall anyone discussing it much after the fact, but it was traumatic and definitely left an impression. That I do recall.

 

He hit me too on the odd occasion for various reasons. I was no angel as a child and I may not always have conducted myself with the propriety and reasonableness that should, of course, inform the actions of all well-behaved five year old boys. I remember one time when at about six years of age, maybe seven, I smacked a kid (accidentally, of course) over the head with a garden hoe drawing a substantial amount of blood. No serious damage done, but you know how head wounds can bleed. I got ‘the strap’ for that one. When my father got home from work that day and my mother had conferred with him telling him of all the sordid details of my great misdead, his duty (I presume he saw it as that) would be to clinically administer several blows to my open hand with a rubber and leather strap he had gotten from his workplace and which he kept on a kitchen shelf for just such occasions. He did not draw blood, but in his mind I had to learn that there were consequences for what I had done. The logical course of action was for him to hit me, a perfectly acceptable and even expected thing to do at the time.

 

My father was driven by a sense of duty to his church, his family, and French-Canadian tradition. He did not question his duty to have as many children as God expected of him and he took great joy in each of us. He was ill-educated in the formal sense. He never learned to read nor write although he could do rudimentary arithmetic. He might have made it only to grade four in school but it was not because he was incapable of schoolwork, but because he was needed to work on the farm in Alberta and for other reasons not of concern here for the moment.   He seldom drank alcohol and didn’t smoke but he did gamble every once in a while. He was what most people would have called “a good man” in the day. He worked hard and rose to management positions in lumber mills around the Lower Mainland in spite of his illiteracy.

 

I don’t know if what I am about to write is true or not, but it may very well be given the time. It was 1945, June 22nd. The war would be over soon. Normally this day would be a time for celebration, but this day would not be one of those. This day my father’s wife, Yvonne, would die in childbirth. She was an otherwise healthy 29 year old woman who had already given him five daughters. This day, something would go horribly wrong in the delivery room and Yvonne would bleed to death. Her newborn son would also die in the deIivery room. I heard it said that Yvonne died because my father couldn’t afford a blood transfusion that would have saved her life. I don’t know that to be true, but just imagining what he had to go through with his wife dying in childbirth and five young daughters to look after at home I expect that he was wrought with anger, panic and despair no matter how his wife had died. He may have believed that it was God’s will. I’m certain my father thought about that wretched day in 1945 every subsequent day of his life.

Does big business serve us or do we serve big business?

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 2 Comments

Thorstein Veblen, the controversial American economic historian and philosopher who died in 1929, just before the Great Depression, understood the capitalist mode of production better than most.  He wrote extensively on Karl Marx’s work (in The Place of Science in Modern Civilization) and found it to be internally logical but based on the moral premise that workers deserve to receive the full value for their participation in the productive process.  According to Veblen’s interpretation of Marx, work is a social activity but the output of that activity is appropriated privately.  We know that workers do not receive the full benefit of their participation in the work process, their employers pay them only part of the value workers create.  Otherwise, surplus value and profit could not be possible.

Just as a quick aside, Marx understood that workers did not share in the value they produced except in the receipt of wages, a value pre-determined in the productive process by and large.  Workers sell their labour-power (that is, their capacity to work) to the capitalist in the labour market. A capitalist has to have all the elements of productive capacity in place before production begins and that includes labour. So, labour is part of the cost of production determined before production can begin.

It’s interesting how screwed up we are about our place in the world, particularly around our role in the productive process.  So, business evolved historically as a means to satisfy certain human needs and wants.  It’s a method by which production and distribution are organized.  Ironically, as business capital came to dominate industry more and more, we, as members of societies in our capacities as productive beings, came to serve business rather than the other way around.  Of course, we have the idea that we all live as citizens in democratic society, free to move around from employer to employer if we want.  In other words, we have the illusion of having some control of our lives, but that’s just what it is, an illusion.  The fact is that we are supposed to be served by business but we are essentially the servants of, and work at the whim of, business.  The world has been stood on its head.  Make no mistake about it though, business cannot exist unless we offer ourselves up as workers to it in the labour market. (I’ll deal with public sector work and small business in the next post.)  We are workers, citizens and consumers but it is our role as worker that is the most important in our world.

Business is becoming more and more global in scope and reach.  With some exceptions it used to be that businesses hired workers locally for local production and distribution and for local consumption.  That all changed starting in the 15th Century but the 19th Century was when this movement increased dramatically.  Workers in the Canadian forest industry (employed by British companies) produced timber for British manufacturing plants and to build tall ships. Later workers in BC produced lumber predominantly for the American housing market.  In truth, Canada has always been a source of raw materials intended for processing elsewhere as much as possible.  That’s not entirely true, but as a basic thrust and overall aim, it is accurate.

In the 1920s the British Empire was losing power over its colonies including Canada while the United States was growing stronger and more influential on a global scale.  In that period of time, the Canadian government succeeded in negotiating the Auto Pact with the US whereby cars sold in Canada must be made in Canada.  Since that time, the US has been on a mission to erode those early gains by Canadian workers, and the Auto Pact has been unravelling for at least a couple of decades now helped along, I may add, by free trade agreements.

This is all to argue that business, and us as workers, used to live primarily under the banner of citizenship.  It made sense to think of Canadian business and American corporations.  (This is also true for union, by the way)  That’s no longer true for the largest global corporations.  More than ever, capital dominates industry and production on a global scale but it still has certain national ties that make it seem as though it serves national interests, including those of ordinary citizens.  That is no longer true and is getting to be a more and more dangerous illusion.

The seemingly miraculous rise of China as a global economic power must be understood as arising from a massive shift of capital by Canadian, American and European business to productive capacity on (for example) Chinese soil in factories using cheap labour.  “Canadian” business has no loyalty at all to Canadian workers.  That’s clear.  Its business logic and primary mission is to accumulate capital.  If that means shutting down factories in Oshawa, Windsor, Hamilton and Montreal and opening them in export processing zones in China or by creating “Chinese” contractors to manufacture consumer goods, so be it.  Now, work is also becoming obviously global with the shift of manufacturing capacity to China (and other countries like India, Sri Lanka, Viet Nam, etc.) and the rise of the new class of ‘temporary’ workers in Canada.  Things are shifting all over the place.  It’s hard to keep track of it.

The problem with modern capitalism is that it’s completely anarchistic.  There’s nobody in charge.  Corporations are all in it for themselves and countries are becoming increasingly powerless to do any planning that does not put corporate profits first, that is, if they were ever  really interested in doing so in the first place.  Citizenship counts for very little anymore in a world where corporations like Monsanto, Nestlé’s and Exxon call the shots and politicians serve them in any and every way they can.  This includes looking hard to find every way possible to  shift wealth from public to private hands including public-private partnerships (P3s) and the systematic dismantling of government services and their replacement with private contractors doing the same work.

To use a business metaphor, the bottom line is that we are in the throes of a massive shift in the global distribution of capital and labour.  For the foreseeable future, it doesn’t look good for us as workers or as consumers.  As we lose our jobs we will not be able to afford the products produced in China by corporations based in North America, Europe and Australia, even if they are getting relatively cheaper and cheaper.  That can’t be good for businesses that rely on us buying their products made in China but they aren’t going to change the way they do business because they are caught in the treadmill of needing more and more profit and accumulated capital in order to survive.  And they’ll do anything to survive including encouraging global fascism while dismantling democratic institutions (what’s left of them)  as a means of ensuring the ongoing concentration of capital in fewer and fewer hands, while pushing harder than ever using advertizing to convince us to spend, be individualistic, mistrust government, oppose taxation, and ‘get ahead’ by ‘working hard’.

Global Corporate Charters

~ Roger JG Albert ~ 1 Comment

Click to access GTI-Perspectives-Global_Corporate_Charters.pdf

So, I’ve been researching and teaching about the expansion of the global capitalist system for decades.  From all the research I’ve done, it strikes me as just about inevitable that business will soon break away from its national charter licence system to one that is supra-national.

International law as it now stands is virtually toothless, but it won’t be long before a global justice system with enforcement capabilities will be necessary.  When large business corporations no longer operate nationally, but have their headquarters in one country, research and development in another and production in several others with no one country able to legislate their activities, it’s time for a change.  The Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters Association, formerly the Canadian Manufacturers Association, has no problem representing businesses who produce nothing (or virtually nothing) in Canada.  Businesses that formerly produced (manufactured) refrigerators, stoves and other appliances in Canada but who now produce them in China in their own factories or under licence to Chinese companies or in other countries with low wages and virtually no health and safety standards for workers are still considered Canadian manufacturers.  To me that’s pretty odd.

As business corporations become more and more global they will need to be regulated more and more globally if we have any hope at all of avoiding becoming nothing but fodder for the creation of obscene corporate profits. Of course, it’s much more complicated than I’ve stated it here.  I’ll have more to say about this in subsequent blog posts.  In the meantime, have a look at the article for which I’ve included a link above.  Check out its provenance,  the Tellus Foundation.  What they propose in this article is a new global charter system for business corporations.